What is Mathematics? I experience Mathematics as life itself in this body that I inhabit. It is the underlying language that can be used to express all of my experiences. In fact as I exist in my body and experience being I notice that being entails interaction (passive/active) with my environment. My body is a sophisticated array of mechanisms for experiencing the various dimensions of reality. My different senses open ways of understanding reality in terms particular to it. For example my sense of sound gives my the rational numbers and my sense of sight gives me the irrational numbers. Music and sounds in general can be captured by fractions. But sight is more subtle. What can be perceived by sight is infinitesimal blinking into emptiness. Relating these two senses to these two particular sets of numbers may be premature and inchoate but for me without doubt mathematics does not stand outside of life or the universe but is in fact the very mechanism which gives shape to our experience, it is how we draw meaning and understand the structures of reality.
What I find of note is that in my being all of these sets of numbers come together or assume discreteness depending on whether I am just being or focusing along a particular dimension. In full experience all the number sets are present as an integrated whole the way math text books define how the Composite Set contains the irrational and rational etc. I am automatically coordinating data of various kinds to experience a seamless event.
I wonder exactly how the six sets of numbers match our senses:
senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and the mysterious sixth sense
sets of numbers: natural, integer, rational, irrational,real, composite.
It seems to me that there are certain structures in reality which repeat. The peculiar representation of the repeat depends on which set of numbers we are looking at.
